ART
Provocateurs and Participants - a review of Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video at the ICA Boston
/ Julie Perini
06.17.09
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston picks up on a curious trend in recent video art with its current exhibition, Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video, on view through October 18, 2009. The show brings together five videos by five international artists: Yael Bartana, Johanna Billing, Phil Collins, Javier Tellez, and Artur Zmijewski. Sidestepping the moral responsibility required of social scientists housed in academia, these rogue sociologists freely borrow from the methods and conventions of fiction and documentary filmmaking while deploying their own hybrid strategies. The result is a collection of conceptually complex video works whose themes, aesthetics, and politics converge and collide in interesting ways.
Each video centers on a social event. At the very least, something has happened as a result of a pesky artist contriving a situation involving ordinary, though carefully selected, people. Javier Tellez brings together a group of blind people and asks them all to feel an elephant. Phil Collins stages a laughing contest, complete with a cash prize for the longest laugher. Johanna Billing teaches Croatian children to sing a dreamy American pop tune. Yael Bartana asks Israeli teenagers in the Occupied Territories to play a game where some are “police” and others are “settlers.” And most provocative of all, Artur Zmijewski puts Polish nationalists, Catholics, Jews, and queers in a room with art supplies and allows them work out their ideological differences through the creation and destruction of each other’s representations.
This may sound like a lot to take in during one visit to an art museum, and it is. Visitors to the ICA should set aside a couple of hours to see the show, as two of the pieces clock in at almost 30 minutes and the remaining videos are each under ten minutes. This show is not an opportunity to escape everyday existence or wander off into abstraction; this is a chance to examine what happens when a filmmaker intervenes into reality slightly. Each work negotiates the degree to which it is staged or improvised, controlled or uncontrolled, mediated or immediate.
Cover Image: Yael Bartana, Still of Wild Seeds, 2005, Two-channel DVD projection color with sound, 6:39 min/loop, Courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
Each video centers on a social event. At the very least, something has happened as a result of a pesky artist contriving a situation involving ordinary, though carefully selected, people. Javier Tellez brings together a group of blind people and asks them all to feel an elephant. Phil Collins stages a laughing contest, complete with a cash prize for the longest laugher. Johanna Billing teaches Croatian children to sing a dreamy American pop tune. Yael Bartana asks Israeli teenagers in the Occupied Territories to play a game where some are “police” and others are “settlers.” And most provocative of all, Artur Zmijewski puts Polish nationalists, Catholics, Jews, and queers in a room with art supplies and allows them work out their ideological differences through the creation and destruction of each other’s representations.
This may sound like a lot to take in during one visit to an art museum, and it is. Visitors to the ICA should set aside a couple of hours to see the show, as two of the pieces clock in at almost 30 minutes and the remaining videos are each under ten minutes. This show is not an opportunity to escape everyday existence or wander off into abstraction; this is a chance to examine what happens when a filmmaker intervenes into reality slightly. Each work negotiates the degree to which it is staged or improvised, controlled or uncontrolled, mediated or immediate.
Cover Image: Yael Bartana, Still of Wild Seeds, 2005, Two-channel DVD projection color with sound, 6:39 min/loop, Courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam